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mice

Sometime last week I was feeling blessed that we hadn’t had any mice in the a-frame since we really got settled here and the poison did its work. I know that in the summer blog you heard about my sentimentality about the baby mice under our mattress and how I hoped they would live. Now I want them all to either die or go live in someone else’s house.

So, about three weeks ago Bryan lifted some junk wood off the ground to take it to our burn pile and there was another momma mouse and babies that ran in every direction. We still didn’t have the heart to actually collect them and kill them using the car exhaust as my sweet, docile mother suggested.

Then this weekend I went to retrieve some dog toys from a bag in the garage shelter and out ran a mouse. I screamed like every single woman does in the movies and Bryan came running, thinking I had fallen again. That particular mouse had taken up residence in the dog toy bag and had begun nesting in Rhino, the dogs’ very favorite toy. It’s a tragedy that we had to throw her out because nothing is cuter than watching the dogs play with a 3 foot rhinoceros. So it goes.

So, I moved things, put things in tupperware bins instead of in bags, etc.

Then Monday night I entered the a-frame to pee in the middle of the night and felt something rush past me and inside. I thought maybe I had imagined it and that it was just wind, but when when we got up in the morning, there was mouse shit on our counters and table. Nothing is more disgusting than knowing that a little disease infested rodent was crawling all over your eating spaces. Barf. So I went about with the bleach a little and then went to sub, stopping on my way home to buy poison and deterrents. I also don’t like blogging about this because I’m afraid none of my homies will want to visit if they know there have ever been mice in here. Rest assured, they.will.all.die. Anyway, the lady at the store said, “Yep, it’s that time of year,” which meant nothing to me because I have literally never lived somewhere where we had mice problems. That seems hard to believe and I know that lots and lots of people are constantly beating back the little bastards, but somehow I have avoided this my entire life, adding to my horror and awe of people like my beloved Jess who beat them back consistently and singlehandedly. I aspire to her level of b.a.-ness.

The worst part of this little visitor is that he chose to chew on ( I assume to steal the threads for a nest) my Minnesota Nice towel which my dear Allison gave us. Truth be told, it was when I saw that that the waterworks came. The frustration of our water issue compounded my stress and I cried like a school girl for a few minutes. Level-headed Bryan keeps telling me that this is a living-in-the-country issue, but I will not have it. Maybe you’re thinking that I overreacted a little over some silly little towel, especially because it is only slightly chewed and after a little bleach session, it will be fine. BUT, you would clearly not understand that I haven’t even used it because I wanted to make it a piece of art instead of a towel. I had it on top of my towel basket so that it could be appreciated daily and so I could represent Minnesota Nice without fail. Perhaps this is nature’s way of telling me to stop caring so much about things… Nah, probably not.

The night before the visitor, our water line froze solid, meaning we had no way to pump water, meaning we had no way to shower and I had to sub yesterday. It froze because we forgot to pump it dry the last time we pumped water. Bad call given that it just got really cold this week. We tried thawing the ends to no avail. Finally, we had to give up, pull it out of the ground, and roll it up. We put it in the shower all rolled up to melt the water. So, the morning of the realization that we had a mouse friend again, we were also dealing with unrolling the water hose, taking back down to the creek, quickly pumping shower water, and then re-rolling it up and putting it back in the shower. It’s going to be a long winter if we have to do this every time we need water. Also, out bathroom is not large enough to accommodate a 100 foot long water pipe AND us.